Stephen S. Roach, former Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the firm's chief economist, is a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute of Global Affairs and a senior lecturer at Yale's School of Management. He is the author of Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China.

China’s New Normal and America’s Old Habits

NEW HAVEN – China is generating a lot of confusion nowadays, both at home, where senior officials now tout the economy’s “new normal,” and abroad, exemplified by America’s embrace of Cold War-style tactics to contain China’s rise. On both counts, the disconnects are striking, adding a new dimension of risk to the impact of the “China factor” on a fragile world.

The official view in China is that its economy has already arrived in the Promised Land of the “new normal.” Indeed, that was the theme of the just-concluded China Development Forum (CDF) – an important platform for debate among China’s senior officials and a broad cross-section of international participants that occurs immediately after the annual National People’s Congress.

This suggests that China’s “new normal” will be the government’s top priority this year. But there remains considerable ambiguity as to what exactly the new normal entails – or whether it has even been achieved.

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